A valuable collection of over 35,000 Hawaiian land shells, assembled by the late Reverend Oliver Pomoroy Emerson, of Brookline, has been given to the University Museum of Comparative Zoology, it was learned yesterday.

Numbering about 300 differently named forms, collected at a thousand stations in the Islands, the collection contains many species now extinct and is regarded as one of the best over assembled in that area.

Deforestation Causes Extermination

Emerson was born on the Island of Maui in 1845, of missionary parents. As a boy he began to collect tree snails from the Hawaiian mountain ridges, valleys, and low coastlands. Since his collections were begun, deforestation of the lowlands to create farm and grazing land, and importation of foreign animal and insect posts, have led to the extermination of many of the species.

The shells, all from the family of achatinellidae, are vari-colored, in green, yellow, mahogany brown, red-brown, white, black, and striped designs. This family is peculiar to the Hawaiian islands, and is found nowhere else in the world.

In the Harvard Museum, Emerson's collection will be added to the amateur collections made in Hawaii by the Reverend John Gulick and by William Harper Pease, a surveyor. Harvard's total collection of these norms is described by authorities as one of the most important in the world.

Mr. Emerson died this summer at Intervale, N. H., at the age of 93 years.